In March 2023, I traveled to Paris, where human and animal feces smeared the streets.
PARIS WAS BURNING.
I didn’t take the time to comprehend why trash was piling up and stinking up the City of Lights and “love,” but I did enjoy the chaos it inflicted on a place that I found remained committed to anti-Blackness. Seeing the French navigate their precious city, now losing in a coup d’état to 10-foot-high piles of waste, was healing for me. The irony was that I’d inherited so much trash from the French, and they could not reconcile their own shit for months.
I WAS PLEASED.
See, I was born in a city within a country within a continent that had been divided, exploited, and left for dead by colonizers from France, England, Portugal, Italy, and Germany. I was born into a white man’s wet dream that did not offer me gold, timber, or ivory from the land of my ancestors, but instead tossed me white supremacy, capitalism, elitism, and environmental degradation as a value system. The colonizers left their subjects the worst type of inheritance: inferiority. The colonial project created laws, policies, cultural norms, and hierarchies that told us being Black, poor, “ugly,” uneducated, and queer were reasons for our exploitation and denigration. And today, most of us from these colonized lands still believe in this trash - that being Black, poor, “ugly,” uneducated, and queer is to be reversed with bleaching creams, college degrees, plastic surgery, weight loss, and Jesus.
NOW, CAN WE WAKE UP FROM THE WET DREAM?
In this piece, I break down the trash mindsets, complexes, habits, ideologies, concepts, perspectives, and words I/we have inherited from white colonial settlers globally. I want to share my ongoing journey to decolonization, framing my mind and body as primary sites for healing. I use a “database” of physical objects as personifications of larger colonial contradictions that my mind and body engage with daily - like adoring the artistry of Beyoncé while becoming repulsed by, with, and for the insatiability of Black capitalism.
I argue that, as a result of being born into a system of white supremacy, it is our everlasting work to accept ourselves - spirits and bodies - as more than sites for transformation into the image of the colonizer. I want this piece to serve as a reminder that we are more than money, light skin, designer clothing, thin waists, and degrees from racist institutions of higher “learning.” We’re spirits, and we’re healing from generations of colonization, but perhaps the first step is recognizing that this trash was never ours to begin with.
THE WORK IS CLEANING THE DIRT OFF THE GOLD.
